A magazine body: a running head on a rule, a wide headline, the prose packed into two true text columns under it, and numbered footnotes gathered on a rule at the foot. core/group, core/columns, core/paragraph, core/heading and core/separator.
The signature moment
Airy head, packed body
Density contrast. The top of the section is almost empty: a 14px running head and a folio number at the two ends of a rule, then a headline at up to 60px held to 48rem with air around it. Then the body arrives as two 50% columns of 16 to 18px prose on a 1.65 line height with a 3.5rem gutter, and the section is suddenly dense, the way a page of a broadsheet is dense below its headline. The footnote strip repeats the head's device at the foot: a wide rule, then two columns of 14px notes keyed to superscripts in the body.
What it inherits from your theme
- Typeface. None stated. This is the pattern most changed by a serif theme, and it was drawn for that: two columns of Cardo look like a newspaper, two columns of Manrope look like a report.
- Palette.
baseground,contrasttext, two-rung chains. The headline carries its colour explicitly. - Both rules.
core/separatorblocks stating no colour. - Spacing rhythm. Core spacing presets.
What it decides for itself
- The band: 66rem. The gutter: 3.5rem. The headline measure: 48rem, as a nested left-justified constrained group rather than a
padding-righton the heading. - Body proportion:
clamp(1rem, 1.25vw, 1.125rem)on 1.65, a step smaller and tighter than the single-column editorial patterns because two columns want it. - Footnotes:
max(0.875rem, 14px)on 1.55, numbered in bold.
What you change first
- The running head and folio. Section name left, number right.
- The headline. Up to about twelve words.
- The body. Two paragraphs per column. To add, copy a paragraph into the column that is shorter, so the two columns end near the same line.
- The footnotes. One per column. Remove the
<sup>markers from the body if you remove the notes.
How the columns work131 words
The two text columns are one core/columns row with two 50% columns, and the prose is distributed by hand: the left column holds the first two paragraphs, the right holds the next two. This is not CSS multi-column, which core does not expose and which would reflow a paragraph across the gutter; each paragraph lives whole in one column, and the order reads down the left and then down the right. The band is 66rem, so each column is a little under 30rem at full width, which at 17px is 60 to 65 characters: the upper half of the ideal measure, and well inside the 95-character limit.
The footnotes are a second core/columns row with the same two widths and the same gutter, so the notes align under the body columns.
What happens at 39063 words
Both rows stack, which is the one layout decision core makes for you below 782px and exactly the right one here: four paragraphs become one column in reading order, and the two footnotes follow under their rule. The running head wraps to two short lines. The headline floors at 32px. The superscript markers in the body are core's <sup>, which every theme renders.
Contrast26 words
Every pair is contrast on base. The headline is large text at 3:1; body, running head and footnotes are held to 4.5:1. Rules carry no text.
The markup
Core block markup and nothing else. Copy it, then paste it straight into the block editor: WordPress reads the delimiters and rebuilds the blocks.
Fetching the markup…